Donate todayWednesday, September 2, 2026Good morning! 
The sprawling xAI campus on the Tennessee-Mississippi border, outside of Memphis, looks like a small boomtown.
Buses transport workers in and out all day, amid clouds of construction dust. Men with lime green construction vests drive Teslas. Signs on fences warn against drones seeking to capture what’s on the other side, like the roughly 60 to 70 gas turbines that power the massive AI data center’s operations.
But what’s not hidden, reports Caroline Eggers, is the sound those gas turbines make.
These turbines were rolled in on semitrucks over the past year, without permits, as part of what was promised to be a temporary power plant. They are designed like jet engines, but unlike a plane, the turbines never turn off.
“It’s 24/7,” said neighbor Jason Haley, who can just make out a wall of the xAI campus from his backyard in Southaven, Miss., just over the state line from Memphis.
“People will say it’s like white noise. … It’s not. It’s a feeling.”
WHAT TO KNOW
Photo: Christopher Blank / WKNOData center complexes emit both very low and high frequencies. Low-frequency noises, such as the internal humming of systems cooling processing chips, travel long distances and penetrate homes.
“It cannot be shut out by closing doors and windows, and so when people hear it in their home, they’re not able to get away from it. It’s inescapable,” said Jamie Banks, president of the health advocacy group Quiet Communities.
Even when data center owners invest money into sound barriers, low-frequency soundwaves go up and over them, Banks said.
Current evidence suggests the noise of data centers is affecting people, pets and wildlife. And a lot of harm happens at night, when people may think they are not responding to their environment, according to Dr. Mathias Basner, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a stress to the body, but we are unaware of that,” he said. “That is the big problem.”
As this emerging source of noise pollution proliferates across the nation, Basner said the need for more research to understand its harms is urgent. But he also warned against using this research gap to delay action, which is something he hears from industries seeking to avoid regulations.
Meanwhile, xAI said it’s working on building about 40 permanent turbines that will be quieter, and it will remove its collection of temporary turbines in one year. The company did not respond to a request for comment about the new turbines or other steps to reduce noise levels.
But Caroline reports that the power situation may soon become even more complex and potentially noisier: Earlier this month, owner Elon Musk announced that the company would expand to 20 gigawatts of compute power, fed primarily by “the power plant.”
Neighbor Jason Haley, meanwhile, has reported the issue to local officials and police, and he sued the SpaceX-owned company in June in a citizen lawsuit. He’s not optimistic about xAI’s current plans.
“I was told I think in November that the noise would be getting better in a week. And here we are. It hasn’t gotten any better,” he said.
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MORE TO KNOW
- Dolly Parton’s estate has announced Dollyfest, a two-day festival to be held in Nashville and London across two consecutive weekends in 2027. According to a press release, the festival was originally scheduled to take place around her 80th birthday this past January, but was postponed because of Parton’s health challenges. Now, organizers say, it will serve as a celebration of her legacy, in lieu of any kind of formal public ceremony. (There was a private service for Parton on Friday attended only by immediate family, the Associated Press has confirmed.)
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 100 people in Memphis over the weekend — the largest raid in the city’s history, according to the local immigrant rights group 901 Vecindarios. Eyewitnesses with the group said that ICE agents raided the bar El Corralón around 1 a.m. on Sunday morning with a fleet of rented buses. In a statement, Vecindarios said that agents intimidated witnesses into deleting recordings and discouraged filming by shining lights into the people’s cameras. A spokesperson for the Memphis Safe Task Force told The Memphis Commercial Appeal that the multi-agency group had no involvement in the raid. [WPLN]
- Nashville’s police chief decommissioned a member of the city’s SWAT team after he fatally shot a man on Saturday morning. Joshua Baney has been with the Metro Nashville Police Department for 12 years. He fired three shots at 54-year-old Jason William Sexton. Police say the officer arrived to what was already an hourlong standoff with Sexton, who was holding a sword, arguing with officers, and keeping a woman in his car against her will. The newly arriving officer was told to use his police truck to block the vehicle, but Baney got out of his truck, moved ahead of other officers, took aim and fired within 10 seconds, according to body camera footage. MNPD and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation are both reviewing the fatal shooting. [WPLN]
- Novelist and poet Wendell Berry has died at his home in Kentucky at age 92. He started his career as a writer and academic, with a prestigious position as an English professor at New York University by the time he was 28. But he left to farm his family’s land in Henry County, Ky., which inspired his work as a writer and environmentalist. He was a stark critic of industrialized farming, and generally skeptical of technology. He never owned a computer — instead, he wrote by hand, then typed it up on a typewriter he purchased new in 1956 and never needed to replace. [NPR]
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